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RADEK AND RANSOME 



ON RUSSIA 



Being Arthur Ransome's "Open Letter to America" 
with a New Preface by Karl Radek 



Price, 5 Cents 



THE SOCIALIST PUBLICATION SOCIETY 

243 55th STREET BROOKLYN, N. Y. 



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^^^^RADEK AND RANSOME 

ON RUSSIA 

Preface by KARL RADEK y^ 

This pamphlet was written last May, by Arthur Ran- 
some, the correspondent in Russia of the "Daily News," as 
a report for the President of the United States of America. 
It was taken to America by Colonel Robins, the representa- 
tive of the American Red Cross in Russia, a man who had 
the confidence of President Wilson. When Colonel Robins 
was leaving for America, it was clear that the policy of 
"watchful waiting" was coming to an end, that American 
capital would soon decide either to help Soviet Russia or 
else go over to the camp of her enemies. Colonel Robins, 
himself a workman by origin, was able to understand that in 
Russia only two things were possible ; either the Soviet 
Government or else complete chaos. He did not waver and 
came to the conclusion that it was necessary to give economic! 
help to Russia for her consolidation, otherwise, in his opinion, 
she would be threatened with disruption at the hands of Ger- 
man imperialism. A believer in modem economic giants and 
having no faith in the strength of Socialism in America, he 
was nevertheless a man with clear penetrative insight and 
understood that the effete Russian bourgeoisie was not capa- 
ble of taking in its weak trembling hands the task of the 
economic regeneration of Russia. He was convinced that 
Russia would be a socialistic state and that the capitalist 
countries would have to take her into consideration. He was 
convinced that it would be impossible to conquer hundreds 
of thousands of people, v whose development foreign capital 
would not be able to guarantee. For him there existed two 
alternatives : either German capital would assist the economick 
reorganization of Russia, in which case American capital 
would lose its greatest market in the future, or on the other 
hand American capital would help Russia economically and 
thus prevent a German monopoly. Basing his ideas on these 
facts, Colonel Robins was an energetic and convinced oppo- 
nent of intervention and regarded with deep disdain the .^. 




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policy of the American ambassador, Francis, whom he called 
the "weather-cock of the chatter-box Noiilens." He therefore 
hastened to America to avert intervention. Colonel Robins 
was much assisted in acquiring his knowledge of Russian 
affairs by the author of this pamphlet, Arthur Ransome, a 
man who came to Russia without any political convictions 
and who was sent, as a well known writer, in order that he 
might in vivid pictures acquaint the English reader with the 
condition of affairs on the Russian front. Arthur Ransome, 
who in the ordinary course of events was more interested in 
ethical and philosophical questions, developed his ideas, dur- 
ing the three years' war in Russia, just as any honest cul- 
tured man would have done, who loves the people and has 
no bourgeois prejudices. In his daily communications with 
the soldiers on the front and afterwards with all circles of 
Russian society, beginning with people like Peter Struve and 
Miliukov and ending with the '"bloodthirsty" Bolsheviks, he 
passed from the Cadet outlook on Russian affairs to that of 
the Bolsheviks. Nevertheless he is not a Bolshevik. He is 
a man with his eyes open, with a warm heart, without any 
prejudices, a man whose deep love for the masses and for 
all who were hurled into this war and its hellish misery, 
enabled him to understand Russia. To his honor let it be 
said that so-called Socialists, yes and alas ! "Marxists," like 
Martoff, could learn, if they would, from this English cor- 
respondent, what Soviet Russia really is, and in so learning, 
would not lose sight of the mighty river, because of the dirt which 
it carries with it. 

Finally it is necessary to add a few words supplementing 
this pamphlet. In actual fact they have already been written by 
Ransome's colleague. Philips Price, correspondent in Russia 
of the "Manchester Guardian," in his courageous pamphlet, 
"The Truth about the Allied Intervention in Russia." But 
since we do not know if Price's pamphlet will reach the hands 
of its readers, it is necessary for me, in the absence of my 
friend Ransome, to explain in a few words why his efforts 
and the efforts of Colonel Robins were not crowned with 
success. 

Russia made to American and English capital a business 
offer, which would have given to the latter a certain profit 
and to the former the possibility of restoring her economic 



tH50Bl 



strength, of fortifying herself for the fight against all enemies, 
amongst which would be included German imperialism, if it 
thought fit to attack Soviet Russia. But of course people 
who deeply disdain the toiling masses, people who for hun- 
dreds of years have held them under their yoke, could not 
possibly believe that a labor government was capable of 
organizing Russia in such a way that she could guarantee 
herself against German imperialism. They could not believe 
that the toiling masses would not bow down their necks to 
them, and they ignored the fact that the united wisdom of 
all the capitalist states had not been able to save these masses 
from the horrors of a four years' war. If the Soviet Govern- 
ment of Russia could develop and strengthen itself, then 
indeed there would be evidence that the workers, after over- 
throwing the yoke of capitalism, could themselves order then- 
own life. That would be a proof, which would react upon the 
toiling masses, of all lands with unheard-of force. The capi- 
talism of the Allies could not with its own hands create the 
belief in the minds of its own working classes of the useless- 
ness of capitalist governments. That is a common psycho- 
logical phenomenon, which it is possible to observe both 
with Entente and with German imperialism. In the case of 
the Allies this point of view was given particular prominence 
in view of the military situation and of the military position 
of the Allies. German capitalism was ready for a business 
deal, for its interests demanded that there should be no East- 
ern front. It was carrying on a severe struggle in the West 
and whatever it may have thought of a government of the 
working classes, it was satisfied if this government by its 
own strength and for its own interests kept ofif the forces 
of the Allies from penetrating far into Russia. Therefore 
with a heavy heart it had to pretend to believe that a work- 
ers' and peasants' government did not necessarily mean the 
end of the world. Allied capitalism on the other hand, was 
directly interested in establishing the Eastern front. It 
wanted to create it in order to draw off the forces of German 
imperialism from the Western front to the Eastern and 
therefore it was natural that with it the fundamental tendency 
of all capitalist society, namely hatred for a workers' govern- 
ment, should overcome all others. The fact that France plays 
a great role in directing the policy of the Allies clenched the 



decision, for France is a country of small shop-keepers, who 
never forget that Russia is in debt to them and who are even 
ready to bring ruin upon themselves, in order to claim their 
judicial rights to the last farthing. Therefore the voice of 
Robins had to remain the voice of one crying in the wilder- 
ness, and Mr. Wilson, the prisoner of Wall Street, while read 
ing the pamphlet of our friend Ransome, doubtless shook his 
head and tearfully remarked: ''What a pity that I cannot help 
Russia but have got to stab her in the back:" 

But now, face to face with the attacks of the Allied 
bandits, Soviet Russia does not feel in the same mood towards 
the Allies as she did when Ransome wrote the last lines of 
his pamphlet. We are not going to die in order to go down 
to history, pure, like Antigone, who was forgiven everything 
because she served the will of God. "Ulster will fight! 
Ulster v^nll be right!" The ^ Allies' attack on Russia, which 
in some ways rerhinds one of the attack on her of German 
imperialism, lets loose a flood of energy, calls forth an iron 
determination not to die a heroic death but to conquer in 
stubborn fight. And if Ransome finished his pamphlet with 
the words that history will judge England and America by 
the way in which they helped or hindered Soviet Russia, we 
are convinced that it will condemn them not only as capitalist 
countries which went to fight against a workers' Russia. This 
condemnation is intolerable to the ethics of Ransome, but 
would be quite tolerable to the representatives of capitalist 
states, whose problem by no means includes help to a work- 
ers' revolution. But history will punish them, for it will show 
they could not estimate the force of current events and in 
politics folly is punished more severely than ill-will. For 
either the Allies will not send great forces against Russia, 
and then they will, together with the Russian counter-revolu- 
tionaries, suffer disgraceful defeat, or else they will send 
great forces and then they will weaken themselves on their 
main fronts, which for geographical reasons are neither 
Siberian nor Northern Russian fronts. The allied attack also 
will show the working masses of England. France, America 
and Italy the meaning of such phrases as ''democracy," "free- 
dom," etc., in the name of which they are sent to die. It 
would be very good that at the moment when the Allies wish 
to concentrate all the strength of their people for war to the 



bitter end in the name of the illusions on which they have 
fed their people, illusions about greatness, honor and glory, 
they show them the real objects for which they are fighting. 
We, as enemies of all imperialism, helped by our wounds, by 
our blood, by our humiliation at Brest-Litovsk, the toiling 
masses of Germany to understand how their government was 
deceiving them, when it talked about an honorable peace. 
And the blood which the soldiers of our revolutionary army, 
the sons of the toiling masses of Russia, shed in their fight 
with the Allied hirelings will be the best ink for our letters 
which will explain to them how their government is deceiv- 
ing them. We are convinced that the workers of the Allied 
countries will understand us and will send us more powerful 
help than did President Wilson, to whom this pamphlet was 
addressed. 

KARL RADEK. 
Moscow, Sept. 1918. 



A LETTER TO AMERICA 

By Arthur Ransome 



LETTERS. 

Every day brings a ship, 
Every ship brings a word; 
Well for those who have no fear, 
Looking seaward well assured 
That the word the vessel brings 
Is the word they wish to hear. 



Emerson wrote the poem that I have stolen for headpiece 
to this letter, and Emerson wrote, the best commentary on 
that poem : — 

"If there is any period one w^ould desire to be born in, 
is it not the age of revolution; when the old and the new 
stand side by side, and admit of being compared ; when the 
energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope ; when 
the historic glories of the old can be compensated by the rich 
possibilities of the new era? This time, like all times, is a 
very good one, if we but know what to do with it." 

Revolution divides men by character far more sharply 
than they are divided by war. Those whom the Gods love 
take the youth of their hearts and throw themselves gladly 
on that side, even if, clearsighted, they perceive that the fires 
of revolution will burn up perhaps the very things that, for 
themselves, they hold most dear. Those others, wise, circum- 
spect, foolish with the folly of wisdom, refrain and are burned 
up none the less. It is the same with nations, and I send this 
pamphlet to America, because America supported the French 
Revolution, when England condemned it, and because now 
also America seems to me to look towards Russia with better 
will to understand, with less suspicion, without the easy 
cynicism that prepares the disaster at which it is afterwards 
ready to smile. Not that I think all this is due to some spe- 
cial virtue in America. I have no doubt that it is due to 
geographical and economic conditions. America is further 
from this bloody cockpit of Europe, for one thing. For 



another, even rich Americans, dependent for their full pockets 
on the continuance of the present capitalist system, can 
wholeheartedly admire the story of the bolshevik adventure, 
and even wish for its success, without fearing^ any serious 
damage to the edifice in which they live, on which they feed, 
like parasites on cheese. Or it may be that, knowing so little 
about America, I let myself think too well about it. Perhaps 
there too men go about repeating easy lies, poisoning the 
wells of truth from simple lack of attention to the hygiene 
of the wind. I do not know. I only know that, from the 
point of view of the Russian Revolution, England seems to 
be a vast nightmare of blind folly, separated from the con- 
tinent, indeed from the world, by the sea, and beyond that by 
the trenches and deprived, by some fairy godmother who was 
not invited to her christening, of the imagination to realize 
what is happening beyond. Shouting in daily telegrams 
across the wires from Russia I feel I am shouting at a drunken 
man asleep in the road in front of a steam roller. And then 
the newspapers of six weeks ago arrive, and I seem to see 
that drunken sleeping fool make a motion as if to brush a fly 
from his nose, and take no further notice of the monstrous 
thing bearing steadily towards him. I love the real England, 
but I hate, more than I hate anything on earth (except 
cowardice in looking at the truth) the intellectual sloth, the 
gross mental indolence that prevents the English from mak- 
ing an effort of imagination and realizing how shameful will 
be their position in history when the tale of this last year in 
the biography of democracy comes to be written. How 
shameful, and how foolish . . . for they will on that day be 
forced to realize how appalling are the mistakes they com- 
mitted, even from the mere bestial standpoint of self-interest 
and expediency. Shameful, foolish and tragic beyond tears . . . 
for the toll will be paid in English blood. English lads will 
die, and English lads have died, not one or two, but hundreds 
of thousands, because their elders listen to men who think 
little things and tell them little things, which are so terribly 
easy to repeat. At least half of our worst mistakes have been 
due to the underestimation of some person or force outside 
England, and disturbing to little men who will not realize 
that chaos has come again and that giants are walking in the 
world. They look across Europe and see huge things, 

10 



monstrous figures, and, to save themselves, and from respect 
for other little lazy minds, they leap for the easiest tav^dry 
explanation, and say, "Ah, yes, bogies made in Germany with 
candles inside turnip heads !" Then having found their 
miserable little atheistical explanation they din it into every- 
body, so that other people shall make the same mistakes, and 
they have company in folly, and so be excused. And in the 
end it becomes difficult for even honest-minded sturdy folk in 
England to look those bogies squarely in their turnip faces 
and to see that they are not bogies at all, but the real article, 
giants, whose movements in tlie mist are of greater import 
for the future of the world than anything else that is happen- 
ing in our day. 

I think it possible that the Revolution will fail. If so, 
then its failure will not mean that it loses its importance. The 
French Revolution gave a measure of freedom to every nation 
in Europe, although it failed most notably in France and 
ended in a Dictator and a defeated Dictator at that, and, for 
the brave clearsighted France, foreseen by Diderot and 
Rousseau, substituted a France in which thought died and 
everyone was prone to grub money with a view to enslav- 
ing everybody else. The failure of the French Revolution 
did not lessen the ardor which the ideas which sprung from it 
poured into the minds that came to their maturity after. 1795. 
And perhaps it was that failure that sharpened the conflict 
of the first half of the nineteenth century, when, after it, 
many candles were lit and fiercely, successfully guarded in 
the windy night which followed the revolutionary sunset. Let 
the revolution fail. No matter, if only in America, in Eng- 
land, in France, in Germany men know what it was that failed, 
and how it failed, who betrayed it, who murdered it. Man 
does not live by his deeds so much as by the purpose of his 
deeds. We have seen the flight of the young eagles. Nothing 
can destroy that fact, even if, later in the day, the eagles fall 
to earth one by one, with broken wings. 

It is hard here, where the tragedy is so close at hand, 
so intimate, not to forget the immediate practical purpose of 
my writing. It is this : to set down, as shortly as possible 
the story of the development of the Soviet power in Russia, 
to show what forces in Russia worked against that power and 

11 



why, to explain what exactly the Soviet Government is, and 
how the end of the Soviet Government will mean the end of 
the revolution, whatever may be the apparent character of any 
form of Government which succeeds it. 

CIRCUMSTANCES OF THE MARCH REVOLUTION. 

Revolutions are not definite political acts carried out by 
the majority in a nation who are unanimous in desirinor a 
single definite object. Revolutionaries and their historians 
often try to give them that character afterwards, but that is 
only an illustration of man's general tendency to supply his 
instinctive acts with family pedigrees of irreproachable, 
orderly reasoning. It would be less dignified but more honest 
to admit that revolution is a kind of speeding up of the politi- 
cal flux, during which tendencies that in ordinary times would 
perhaps only become noticeable in the course of years, come 
to full fruition in a few weeks or days. Revolution turns the 
slow river of political development into a rapid in which the 
slightest action has an immediate efifect and the canoe of Gov- 
ernment answers more violently to a paddle dipped for a 
moment than in ordinary times to the organized and prolonged 
effort of its whole crew. 

Those servants of the autocracy who fomented disordei 
in Petrograd in March, 1917, believed that by creating and sup- 
pressing an artificial, premature revolt they could forestall 
and perhaps altogether prevent the more serious revolt which 
they had good reason to expect in the future. They were 
wrong, because revolution is not an act of political life but 
a state of political life. Hoping to crush a political act, they 
created the state in which the old means of control slipped 
from their hands and they became incapable of the suppression 
of any acts whatsoever. 

Their immediate political opponents made the same mis- 
take as the servants of the autocracy. They believed that the 
autocracy would carry out its plan and, therefore, did their 
best to prevent the revolution. Thus, when the days of the 
revolution of March, 1917, began, we had the spectacle of the 
autocracy wrestling with the bourgeoisie, both far removed 
from the actual people, both gambling with the lives of the 

12 



people, but with entirely different objects. The autocracy was 
tryin^^ to create a revolution which should fail. The bour- 
geoisie was trying to prevent the autocracy from creating a 
revolution at all. Looking back over a year, it is almost 
laughable to think that it was the autocracy that arrested the 
whole labor group of the Central War Industries Committee, 
because that group of patriotic Socialists had shown them- 
selves capable of preventing trouble with the workmen. It is 
more than laughable to remember that Miliukov, the Cadet 
leader, sent a statement to the papers alleging that someone 
pretending to be Miliukov had been urging the workmen to 
come out into the streets, but that actually he begged the 
workmen, for their own sakes, to do nothing of the kind. 

This is not the place in which to give detailed accounts 
of the methods whereby the autocracy prepared the artificial 
fireworks, which, unfortunately for them, turned into a very 
genuine volcano. It is enough to say that for several months 
before the revolution they had been running kindergarten 
classes for policemen in the use of machine-guns just outside 
Petrograd, that armored cars had been kept back from the 
front with a view to moving target practice in the streets of 
the capital, and that weeks before the actual disorders, Petro- 
grad had been turned into a fortified battleground, with 
machine-gun ambrasures in the garrets of the houses at points 
of strategical advantage. Meanwhile the food shortage, 
already serious in the preceding September, had been steadily 
emphasized. The whole labor of the country had been mobil- 
ized, put in uniforms, armed, and taken from the land, thus 
ensuring starvation for the nation in the not distant future. 
Starvation in the present was ensured by complete breakdown 
in the always inadequate transport. Dissatisfaction with the 
Government was common to every class of the population, 
although it had different causes. Thus the bourgeoisie were 
dissatisfied with the Government because it put difficulties 
in the way of a successful waging of the war that was to give 
Russia Constantinople. The aristocracy were dissatisfied 
with the Tsar on account of his inability to keep his family in 
order or to hide the fact that it was in disorder, the folk, the 
great bulk of the nation, were dissatisfied with the Govern- 
ment because they held the Government responsible for the 
increasingly difficult conditions of their lives. They were dis- 

13 



satisfied with the Government for waging the war, while the 
classes above them were dissatisfied with the Government for 
not waging it well enough. 

For one moment these various discontents were united, 
and in one matter. When the revolution had begun, when the 
flux had already gathered speed, when the banks of the 
hitherto placid stream were already crumbling under pressure 
of the torrent, there was not a single class in the nation that 
was not dissatisfied with the Tsar. The Tsar, accordingly, 
left the stage as politely as he could, as stainlessly as a per- 
son in a play. And. seeing the bloodless character of his 
removal, mistaking his removal for the object and end of 
revolution, English, Americans and French united m 
applauding the most moderate, the biggest, the most sur- 
prising revolution in the world. The bourgeois classes in 
the fighting countries and those of the laboring classes, who 
had been tamed by reading the newspapers to a happy 
acquiescence in bourgeois ideas, were a little troubled lest 
the disturbance in Russia should affect their war, they having 
forgotten that they were fighting for democracy, and that the 
enfranchisement of 180 million souls was in itself a greater 
victory than they had set out to gain, so that, from that 
moment, the main object of the war should have been to save 
that victory. But, if the bourgeois classes in the allied coun- 
tries were a little troubled, their disquiet was as nothing in 
comparison with the helpless terror of the bourgeois classes 
in Russia. They had taken no part in the actual start of the 
revolution. ^liliukov, as he openly confessed to his party, 
had seen from his window the soldiers pouring out into the 
streets with red flags to fight for the people instead of for 
their masters, and he had said to himself: "There goes the 
Russian Revolution, and it will be crushed in a quarter of an 
hour." A little later he had seen more soldiers in the streets 
and decided that it would not be crushed so easily. It wais 
only when the risks had already been taken by plain soldiers 
and workmen, by cossacks who refused to fire on them : it 
was only when the revolution had begun, that the already 
existing organ of the bourgeoisie, the Duma, threw itself into 
line, and, foam on the crest of an irresistible wave, tried vainly 
to pretend that it had the power to control and direct the 
wave itself. 

14 



Already a newer, more vital organ was forming. While 
Miliukov was formulating his ideas about the preservation 
of the dynasty, or in other words, the transfer of the autocracy 
to the bourgeois, the Soviet of workmen's deputies, at first 
merely a small group of Duma labor members, had formulated 
quite other ideas, had declared that the revolution belonged 
to those who made it, not to those who stood aside and then 
sought to profit by it, and had stated that neither Miliukov nor 
the outworn Duma had the right to decide their future, who 
had won their freedom, but that that task should be under- 
taken by a constituent assembly which should represent all 
Russia. The subsequent history illustrated the necessary 
opportunism of all parties in a time of a revolution, since 
within a few weeks Miliukov and his party had declared for a 
republic, and, when the Constituent Assembly met, it had 
already earned for itself a place like that of the Duma among 
the relics of the past, and was gently set aside by the Soviet 
which had been the first cause of its summoning. 



THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT AND THE 

SOVIETS. 



There were thus formed two bodies, each of which 
claimed to represent the revolutionary nation. The .first of 
these was the Provisional Government appointed by an 
Executive Committee of the Duma. It did thus indirectly 
represent that body, which, never fully representative of the 
people, had lost in the course of the war any claim to stand 
for anything except the bourgeois and privileged classes. The 
second of these was the Soviet of workmen's and sailors' 
deputies. Every thousand workmen had the right to send 
one member to the Soviet, and every company of soldiers. 
From the very first there could be no sort of doubt in the 
mind of any unprejudiced observer as to which of these two 
bodies best represented the Russian people. I do not think 
I shall ever again be so happy in my life as I was during 
those first days when I saw workingmen and peasant soldiers 
sending representatives of their own class and not of another. 
I remembered Shelley's, 

15 



"Shake your chains to earth like dew 
Which in sleep had fallen on you 
Ye are many — they are few," 

and wondered that this thin^ had not come to pass before. 
And I thought, how applicable to revolution are Sir Thomas 
Browne's words on the Flood, when he wrote : "That there 
was a deluge once seems not to me so great a miracle as that 
there is not one always." 

Immediately there became visible a definite fissure, soon 
a wide gulf, between the ideals of these two bodies, the Gov- 
ernment and the Soviet. The people, the working classes, 
the peasants, who suffered most from the war, demanded 
that steps should be taken to secure peace. They did not 
want to fight to get territory for the sake of some phantas- 
magoric gain which did not affect them, which they did not 
understand. They were starving already, and saw worse 
starvation ahead. The Government, on the other hand, was, 
if anything, except for the presence in it of Kerensky, the 
Labor member, more definitely imperialistic than the autocracy 
whose place it had taken. 

The gulf between the working classes and the govern- 
ment became suddenly deeper when it was realized that the 
future of the revolution depended on the possession of the 
army. If the army were not to be swept into the revolution, 
if it were allowed to remain apart from politics, it would be a 
passive weapon in the hands of the Government, who would 
thus be able to suppress the Soviets, and so the true expres- 
sion of the people's will, whenever it should think fit. If the 
Government had been able to retain possession of the army, 
then Miliukov might have had his way, and the bourgeoisie 
would have secured the profits of the revolt of the masses. 

This, however, was not to be, and immediately the con- 
tradiction between a revolution and war of the imperialistic 
kind became evident. The army, Avhich at that time meant 
practically the whole of the younger peasantry, took the share 
in politics it had a right to take. From that moment the future 
of the Soviets was assured, and the Bourgeois Government 
was doomed to be a Government only by the good will of the 
Soviets who, within a few days of the beginning of the revolu- 
tion, were the only real power in the country. 

16 



That the Soviets had been right in fearing- retention of 
the army by the Bourgeoisie was prpved again and again, by 
Kerensky, Kornilov, Kaledin, Alexeiev, Dutov, at subsequent 
periods of the revolution, each one in turn basing his resist- 
ance to the Soviets on some part of the army which had been 
kept from the contagion of free political expression. 

Then began the long struggle of the summer. The 
Soviets, in which the moderates who desired to keep the gov- 
ernment as a sort of executive organ, mistrusting their own 
abilities, were in a majority, exerted all their influence on the 
government in the direction of peace. The government made 
its representations to the Allies, but, at any rate at first, 
gambled in the future, and pretended that things were not so 
bad, and that Russia could still take an active part in the war. 
There was a decisive moment when Miliukov wrote a note 
to the Allies calculated to lull them to believe that the changes 
in Russia meant nothing, and that Russia stood by her old 
claims. The soldiers and people poured into the streets in 
protest, and that lie had to be publicly withdrawn. 

Already there was serious opposition to the moderate 
party in the Soviets from the Bolsheviks, who urged that 
coalition with the bourgeoisie was merely postponing peace, 
and bringing starvation and disaster nearer. The Moderates 
proposed a Stockholm Canference, at which the Socialist 
groups of all countries should meet and try to come to a 
common understanding. This was opposed by the Allied 
Governments and by the Bolsheviks on the ground that the 
German majority Socialists would be the agents of the German 
Government. One deadlock followed another. Each succes- 
sive deadlock strengthened the party of the Bolsheviks, who 
held that the Provisional Government was an incubus, and 
that all authority should belong to the Soviets, as indeed, in 
internal affairs, it actually did belong. 

The Bolshevik leaders, Lenin and Trotzky, had come 
from exile in western countries not merely to take their share 
in a Russian Revolution, but to use Russia in kindling the 
World Revolution. They called for peace, but peace, for 
them, was not an end in itself. They could say, with Christ, 
that they brought not peace but a sword. For they hoped 
that in stirring the working classes of the world to demand 

17 



peace from their Governments they would be putting into 
their hands the sword that was necessary for the Social 
Revolution, in which cause they had, like many of their 
friends, spent the best years of their lives. 

In their own country, at any rate, they had proved that 
they were right in their calculation. The struggle for peace, 
the failure to obtain it, shook the Government into the dis- 
astrous adventure of the Galician advance, shook it again 
with the Galician retreat, weakened it with every telegram 
from Allied countries that emphasized the continuance of the 
war. Each shock to the Government was also a shock for the 
Moderate Party in the Soviets. The struggle in Russia 
became, as the Bolsheviks wished it should become, a struggle 
between the classes, a struggle in which the issue became ever 
clearer between the working class and the privileged classes. 
The Government went to Moscow for moral support and 
came back without it. The Kornilov mutiny, a definite threat 
against the Soviets by a handful of the privileged classes 
(made in the guise of a patriotic movement and therefore 
supported by Kornilov himself and certain of the Allies), 
merely strengthened the organization it was intended to over- 
throw. Within the Soviets, the' Moderate Party, which had 
already come by force of events to be a sort of annex of the 
bourgeoisie, grew weaker and weaker after this illustration 
of the danger of their policy. Just as the Government went 
to Moscow to seek support in a Conference, so the Moderate 
Party, feeling support slipping from under it, knowing that 
the next meeting of the All-Russian Assembly of Soviets 
would find it in a minority, treacherously sought new foot- 
hold in an artificial Democratic Assembly. Not even these 
tactics shook the actual fabric of the Soviets, and, when, in 
October, first Petrograd, then Moscow, showed a huge 
Bolshevik majority, the Bolshevik leaders were so confident 
that they had the country behind them that they made every 
single arrangement for the ejection of the Government openly 
over the telephone, and, notwithstanding, neither the Govern- 
ment nor the old moderate Executive Committee (no longer 
an executive) could muster authority to prevent them. 

The point that I wish to make is this ; that, from the first 
moment of the revolution to the present day the real authority 
of the Soviets has been unshaken. The October Revolution 

18 



did not give authority to the Soviets. That had always been 
theirs, by their very nature. It was merely a public open 
illustration of the change of opinion brought about in the 
Soviets themselves by the change of opinion in the working- 
men and soldiers who elected them. The October Revolution 
cleared away the waste growths that hid the true Govern- 
ment of Russia from the world, and as the smoke of the short 
struggle died away, it was seen that that Government had 
merely to formulate an authority it already possessed. 



WHAT IS THE REPUBLIC OF THE SOVIETS? 



The actual formulation of the Soviet constitution was a 
matter of practice guided always by the definite principle 
of the ''Dictatorship of the Proletariat" which I shall briefly 
discuss in speaking of the Constituent Assembly. There had 
been a number of small, formal changes or readjustments of 
interdependent parts in the machine, but I do not think either 
opponents or supporters of the Soviet Government can quarrel 
very seriously with the following statement. Every work- 
man, every peasant in Russia has the right to vote in the elec- 
tion of deputies to his local Soviet, which is made up of a 
number of deputies corresponding to the number of electors. 
The local Soviets choose their delegates to an All-Russian 
Assembly of Soviets. This All-Russian Assembly elects its 
Central Executive Committee, on a basis of approximately 
one in five of the delegates to the Assembly. This Central 
Executive Committee controls, appoints and dismisses the 
People's Commissaries who are the actual Government. All 
decrees of state importance are passed by the Central 
Executive Committee before being issued as law^s by the 
Council of People's Commissaries. 

At each successive All-Russian Assembly of Soviets, the 
Executive Committee automatically resigns, and the Assem- 
bly as a whole expresses its approval or disapproval of what 
has been done by its representatives and by the Council of 
Commissaries during the period since the previous All-Rus- 
sian Assembly, and, electing a new Executive Committee, 
which in political character accurately corresponds to the 

19 



party coloring of the Assembly, ensures that the controlling 
organ shall accurately reflect the feeling of the electorate. 

No limit is set to local re-election. Deputies are with- 
drawn and others substituted for them whenever this seems 
necessary to the local electorate. Thus the country is free 
from the danger of finding itself governed by the ghosts of 
its dead opinions, and, on the other hand, those ghosts find 
themselves expeditiously laid in their graves as soon as, 
becoming ghosts, they cease to have the right to rule. 

Just as the Soviet constitution ensures that the actual 
law-givers shall be in the closest touch with the people, just 
as it ensures that in deed instead of in amiable theory the 
people shall be their own law-givers, so also it provides for 
inter-communication in a contrary direction. The remotest 
atom on the periphery is not without its influence on the 
centre. So also the centre, through the Soviets, affects the 
atoms of the periphery. The institution of the Soviets means 
that every minutest act of the Council of the People's Com- 
missaries is judged and interpreted in accordance with its own 
local conditions by each local Soviet. No other form of gov- 
ernment could give this huge diverse entity of Russia with 
its varying climates and races, with its plains, its steppes, its 
wild mountains, the free local autonomy of interpretation 
which it needs. The shepherd of the Caucasus, the Cossack 
from the Urals and the fisherman from the Yenisei can sit 
together in the All-Russian Assembly, and know that the 
laws, whose principles they approve, are not steel bands, too 
loose for one and throttling another, but are instruments 
which each Soviet can fashion out in its own way for the 
special needs of its own community. 

This constitution is one particularly apt for Russia. It 
is also particularly apt for a country in a time of revolution. 
It affords a real dictatorship to the class that is in revolt, 
and such dictatorship is necessary, since no one could expect 
from members of the class that is being ousted from its place 
of domination whole-hearted assistance in its own undoing. 
Those democrats in other countries and in Russia who do not 
understand what is happening under their eyes, exclaim at the 
unfairness of excluding the bourgeoisie from power. They 
forget or have never realized that the object of the social 

20 



revolution is to put an end to the existence of a bourgeois or 
exploiting class, not merely to make it powerless. If exploita- 
tion is destroyed then there can be no class of exploiters, and 
the present exclusion of the bourgeoisie from government is 
merely a means of hastening and rendering less painful the 
transition of the bourgeois from his parasitic position to the 
more honorable position of equality with his fellow-workers. 
Once the conditions of parasitism, privilege and exploitation 
have been destroyed, the old divisions of the class-struggle 
will have automatically disappeared. 

By the nature of things it has so happened that practically 
all the foreign observers of events in Russia have belonged 
to the privileged in their respective countries, and have been 
accustomed to associate with the privileged classes in Russia. 
They have consequently found it difficult to escape from their 
class in judging the story happening before their eyes. Those 
working-men sent from the Allied countries, less with the idea 
of studying the revolution than of telling it to do what the 
Allies wanted, have also been men especially chosen and 
deprived by their very mandates of the clear eyes and open 
mind they should have had. Socialists especially who had 
long dreamed of revolution found it particularly difficult to 
recognize in this cloudy tremendous struggle the thing which 
their dreams had softened. Nothing has been more remark- 
able or less surprising than the fact that of all the observers 
sent here from abroad those men have seen the thing clearest 
who by their upbringing and standards of life have been 
furthest from the revolutionary movement. 

I do not' propose .to recapitulate the whole program of 
the Soviet Government, or to spend minutes, of which I have 
so few, in discussing in detail their efforts towards an equi- 
table land settlement, their extraordinarily interesting work in 
building up, under the stress of famine and of war, an eco- 
nomuc and industrial organization which shall facilitate the 
eventual socialization of Russia. This is material for many 
letters, and here I have not time for one. I therefore take 
the two events which have been most misused in blackening 
the Soviet Government to those who should have been its 
friends. These were the dissolution of the Constituent 
Assembly, and the negotiations which ended, temporarily at 
least, in a separate peace between Russia and the Central 

21 



Empires. I take these two events, and try to show what 
happened in each case and why the reproaches flung at the 
Soviets on account of them were due either to misunderstand- 
ing or to malice. 

THE CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY. 

I suppose in America, as in England, the dissolution of 
the Constituent Assembly was one of the events that best 
served the people who were anxious to persuade public opin- 
ion that the Soviet Government was a government of usurpa- 
tion holding its own by force, and not representing the will 
of the people. I think that without any special pleading, it 
will be possible to bring together facts which put an entirely 
different light on that event. The mere fact that the parties 
opposed to the Bolsheviks had spent eight months in murder- 
ing the Constituent Assembly, putting off day by day in 
hopes that the country would change, and that the revolution 
would come crawling home asking for a quiet life, and leav- 
ing the gentlemen to do the work of government, should be 
set against the short speech of the sailor who told the Assem- 
bly it had talked enough, that its guards were tired, and that 
really it was time to go to bed. It should be remembered that 
the Constituent Assembly was for neither party an end in 
itself. For each party it represented a political instrument, 
not a political aim. It was a tool, not a task. It was thrown 
away when further use of it would have damaged the purpose 
for w^hich it was invented. The idea of a Constituent Assem- 
bly was first put forward by the Soviet, by the very body 
which, in the end, opposed its realization. The Soviet, in 
those exhilarating days of March, 1917, declared that without 
such an Assembly the future of Russia could not be decided. 
The effect of this declaration was to make impossible Miliu- 
kov's plan of choking the revolution at birth. Miliukov, in 
the first days of the revolution, tried by means of quick 
jugglery with abdications, a regency, and a belated constitu- 
tion, to profit by the elemental uprising of the masses to 
secure an exchange of authority out of the hands of the Tsar's 
bureaucracy into the hands of the bourgeoisie. For him, the 
revolution was to be a tram-car which would stop con- 
veniently at the point where the Cadet Party wished to alight. 

22 



The idea of the Constituent Assembly was like a good big 
label on that tram-car showing that it had a further destina- 
tion. It became clear at once that the car would not stop at 
the point that Miliukov had chosen. The next hope of the 
bourgeoisie was to keep it moving to prevent it stopping any- 
where else until the passengers should be so tired of moving 
that they would be glad to stop anywhere and would be amen- 
able and peaceable on alighting The bourgeois parties delib- 
erately postponed the meeting of the Constituent Assembly, 
since it was clear that, were it to meet at once, its members 
would be practically identical with those of the Soviet, so 
that the voice of the bourgeoisie would be unheard in the roar 
of the waking masses. The aim of the bourgeoisie was (1) 
to postpone the elections until the electors had wearied of the 
Soviets, and (2) to postpone such reforms as most concerned 
the destruction of their own privileges (such as the land 
reforms) until they could summon a Constituent Assembly 
whose character would be agreeable to themselves. While 
the bourgeoisie held this attitude it was natural that the 
Soviets, and, most of all, the left party in the Soviets, should 
use the Constituent Assembly as a means of showing up the 
duplicity of their bourgeois opponents. Gradually circum- 
stances changed. The bourgeosie lost hope, and transferred 
their allegiance to the Moderate majority in the Soviets, 
because they began to realize that the marked increase of 
Bolshevism heralded something, from their point of view, 
even worse than the Constituent Assembly as it would have 
been in April or May. The extremely flexible representation 
of the Soviets show^ed that the masses were "coming nearer 
and nearer to the position of the Bolsheviks, or rather to ? 
readiness to support the Bolshevik leaders in view of the 
manifest failure of the coalition government to get peace or 
indeed anything else that the masses desired. The Constitu- 
ent Assembly became now the last hope of the original 
moderate members of the Soviet Executive, who felt the 
ground of real support in the active political masses slipping 
from beneath their feet. At this point came the October 
Revolution, when the coalition, already a ghost, and a dis- 
credited ghost, was laid in its grave. Immense Bolshevik 
majorities in the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets, and then in 
the All-Russian Assembly of Soviets, proved that the mass 

23 



of active political opinion in the country fully approved of 
the step that had been taken. 

Then followed the elections of the Constituent Assembly 
(organized and canvassed before the October Revolution) in 
which there was a majority against the Bolsheviks. The 
explanation of this is perfectly simple. It lies in the fact that 
a revolution is a very uncomfoi;table thing for everybody who 
takes part in it, and that great numbers of people, during the 
preceding eight months had come to look forward to the word 
Finis at the end of a difficult lesson-book. The Constituent 
Assembly meant for these people an end to political debate, 
an end even to political life, an end anyhow to revolution. In 
every country it is only a small minority that really concerns 
itself with politics. Outside that minority is a big uncon- 
scious mass of voting material, which does not concern itself 
with active politics, and asks nothing from its government 
except to be let alone. This indifferent mass which took ver}' 
little part in the living politics of the Soviets was ready to 
vote for the Constituent Assembly in sort of dim belief that 
those elections would mean a return to quiet life, and should 
therefore be encouraged. It voted in much the spirit of the 
rich man who is willing to give alms to a deserving charity 
for which he would be most unwilling to do any real work. It 
knew vaguely that the bourgeoisie were fairly bad, and it had 
also heard that the Bolsheviks were terrible people. It there- 
fore put its votes on the side of those people against whom it 
had heard nothing in particular. And the result was that the 
live part of the nation was faced, almost at the moment of 
coming to their own, with a legacy in the form of an Assembly, 
the majority in which was made up of the very men whom 
they had just overthrown. The question was a plain one. 
Should the conscious workers of the country submit to the 
deadweight of the unconscious, even if that deadweight were 
artfully fashioned by their enemies into the form of the very 
tool with which they had themselves been successfully work- 
ing? The question was put at a moment of extreme difficulty, 
when acceptance of the Constituent Assembly would have 
relieved the Bolsheviks (at the New Year) of tremendous 
responsibility. It would have been an easy way out, for 
cowards. But the Bolsheviks were not afraid of responsibility, 
were not looking for easy ways out, were confident that the 

24 



whole of the active conscious population was behind them, 
and swept the Assembly aside. Not anywhere in Russia did 
the indifferent mass stir in protest. The Assembly died like 
the Tsardom and the Coalition before it. Not any one of the 
three showed in the manner of its dying that it retained any 
right to live. 

PEACE NEGOTIATIONS. 

The day after the October Revolution Lenin proposed, and 
the assembly carried, the declaration on peace with its promise to 
do away with the secret diplomacy that had kept Russia in the 
war beyond her strength and allowed small groups to gamble 
in the lives of nations. On that day, October 26, the whole world 
was told that the new Russian Government was ready to con- 
clude peace itself, and invited all the fighting countries to put an 
end to the war, ''without annexation (that is, without the seizure 
of other peoples' land and without the forced incorporation of 
other nationalities) and without indemnity." The declaration was 
sent out by radio on November 7. Some Governments prevented 
its publication, others sought to disguise its true character and to 
give it the appearance of an offer of separate peace. The Allies 
replied to it with a threat conveyed to the Russian commander-in- 
chief, Dukhonin, that further steps towards peace would have 
serious consequences. It should of course be remembered that 
the Allies were in a position of peculiar difficulty. Practically 
all the Russians who were able to give direct information to mem- 
bers of Allied Governments belonged to the classes that had per- 
sistently fed themselves and others with lies as to the character 
of the Bolsheviks. They believed that the Soviets could hold 
authority only for a few days, and they persuaded the Allied 
Governments to share .that belief. The next step of the Soviets 
was an agreement made across the front itself, stopping all mili- 
tary operations between the Black Sea and the Baltic. This was 
followed by another invitation to the Allies to join Russia in 
peace negotiations. Meanwhile the German Government, with 
one eye on the military party and the other on the feeling of Ger- 
man Labor, which at that time was unrestful and excited by the 
Russian Revolution, was hesitating over its answer. I shall not 
here attempt any detailed history of what followed. My only 
point is that the Soviet Government cannot be accused of having 

25 



sought and obtained a separate peace. The first aim of the Bol- 
sheviks was, as it always will be, a Universal Social Revolution. 
They hoped to illustrate to the workers of the world the possibil- 
ity of honorable peace, and nothing would have pleased them 
better than to find that such a peace was rejected by all govern- 
ments alike, so that the workers, convinced of its possibility, 
should rise and overthrow them. That was their general aim. 
They, least of all Governments in the world, were interested in 
a German victory. Their proposal was for a general peace, for 
the peace which Russia, in agony, had been awaiting for a year. 

What followed? Step by step, they published every detail 
of their negotiations over the armistice, every word of the Ger- 
man replies. Then came the first German answer as to the con- 
ditions of peace, in which Germany and her Allies expressed 
themselves ready to make this Russian formula the basis of nego- 
tiation. The Bolsheviks believe that if the Allies had even at 
that late hour joined them, so that in withdrawing from that posi- 
tion the Germans would have been facing a continuance of the 
war as a whole instead of merely a failure to obtain peace with 
the weakest of the Allies, peace on the Russian formula would 
have been attainable. The Allies left them, unrecognized, ig- 
nored, to continue their struggle singlehanded. The Germans 
now took a bolder line, and the hand outstretched in spurious 
friendship became a grasping claw. The first Russian delega- 
tion came home to confer with the Soviet Government as to what 
was to be done in this new situation when the peace they had 
promised their exhausted army, their tortured working classes, 
seemed to be fading like a mirage. Trotzky at the head of a 
reinforced delegation went to Brest with one of the most daring 
plans with which any Daniel had sought to destroy his Goliath. 

The absence of the Allies had deprived him of the possibil- 
ity of exhibiting to the working classes of the world the inability 
of their present governments to conclude a peace in which should 
be neither conqueror nor conquered. He now attempted to bring 
about a revolution in Germany, or obtain such a peace for Russia 
by making the German Government itself illustrate in their nego- 
tiations with him their utter disregard for the expressed wishes 
of the German people. He did actually succeed in causing huge 
strikes, both in Austria and in Gemiany, and it is impossible for 
anyone to say that he would not have finally succeeded in hitting 

26 



the Goliath of Force opposed to him fairly between the eyes with 
this shining pebble of an Idea, which was the only weapon at his 
command, if, at the last moment, his aim had not been deflected, 
and the target shifted by the treachery of the handful of men who 
in the Ukraine were resisting by every means in their power the 
natural development of the Soviets. These men, preferring to sell 
their country to Germany than to lose the reins of government 
themselves, opened separate negotiations, thereby breaking the 
unity of the ideal front which Trotzky opposed to the Germans. 
The Germans saw that with part of that front they could come 
immediately to terms. Instantly their tone in the negotiations 
changed. They persuaded their own people that the Russians 
were themselves to blame for not getting the peace they required, 
and that a just peace was only possible with the Ukraine. Mean- 
while the soldiers and the workers of the Ukraine were gradually 
obtaining complete power over their own country, so that when 
actually Germany concluded peace with the Ukraine, the so- 
called government whose signatures were attached to that 
treacherous agreement were actually in asylum in German head- 
quarters and unable to return to their own supposed capital except 
under the protection of German bayonets. The Soviet triumphed 
in the Ukraine, and declared its solidarity with Russia. The Ger- 
mans, like the Allies, preferred to recognize the better dressed 
persons who were ready to conclude peace with them in the name 
of a country which had definitely disowned them. From that 
moment the Brest peace negotiations were doomed to failure. 
Trotzky made a last desperate appeal to the workers of Germany. 
He said, "We will not sign your robber's peace, but we demobilize 
our army and declare that Russia is no longer at war. Will the 
German people allow you to advance on a defenseless revolu- 
tion?" 

The Germans did advance, not at first in regular regiments, 
but in small groups of volunteers who had no scruples in the 
matter. Many German soldiers, to their eternal honor, refused 
to advance, and were shot. The demobilization of the Russian 
army meant little, because it had long ceased to be anything but a 
danger to the peaceful population in its rear. The Soviet had 
only the very smallest real force, and that, as yet, unorganized, 
with enthusiasm but without confidence, utterly unpractised in 
warfare, consisting chiefly of workmen, who, as was natural, 
were the first to understand what it was they had to defend. It 

27 



soon became clear that serious resistance was impossible. The 
Soviet Government was faced with a choice : to collapse in a 
quite unequal struggle, or to sign a peace agreement of which 
they disapproved. Many thought that the revolution would be 
best served by their deaths, and were ready to die. Lenin doubted 
the efficacy of such a rhetorical gesture, and believed that the 
secession of Russia from the war would ensure the continuation 
of the struggle by the imperialistic groups until such time as 
other countries reached the same exhaustion as had been reached 
by Russia, when, in his opinion, revolution would be inevitable. 
He held that, for the future of the World Revolution, the best 
that could be done would be the preservation, even in seriously 
limited territory, of the Soviet Government, as a nucleus of revo- 
lution, as an illustration of the possibility of revolution, until that 
moment when the workers of Russia should be joined by the 
workers of the world. His opinion carried the majority first of 
the Executive Committee, then of the 4th All-Russian Assembly. 
The Germans replied to the Russian offer to sign peace with a 
statement which was an ironic parody of the Russian declaration 
at Brest. The Russians had said, "We will not sign peace, but 
the war is ended." The Germans said, ''We agree to peace, but 
the war shall continue." 

And indeed, while the Soviet Government moved to Moscow 
the Germans, using in the south the pretext of the Ukrainian 
Rada, and in the north that of the Bourgeois Finnish Govern- 
ment, advanced through the Ukraine to the outlet of the Don, and 
in the north to the very gates of Petrograd. The matter stands 
so, as I write these lines. By the time you read them, much will 
have happened that it is impossible now to foresee. 

THE SOVIET GOVERNMENT AND THE ALLIES. 

From the moment of the October Revolution on, the best 
illustration of the fact that the Soviet Government is the natural 
government of the Russian people, and has deep roots in the 
whole of the conscious, responsible part of the working classes 
and the peasantry, has been the attitude of the defeated minor- 
ities who oppose it. Whereas the Bolsheviks worked steadily in 
the Soviets when the majority was against them, and made their 
final move for power only when assured that they had an over- 

28 



whelming majority in the Soviets behind them, their opponents 
see their best hope of regaining power not in the Soviets, not even 
in Russia itself, but in some extraordinary intervention from 
without. By asking for foreign help against the Soviet Govern- 
ment they prove that such help should not be given, and that they 
do not deserve it. The Soviet has stood for six months and 
more, absolutely unshaken by any movement against it inside 
Russia. In the Ukraine the anti-Soviet minorities asked for in- 
tervention and received it. German bayonets, German organiza- 
tion destroyed the Soviets of the Ukraine, and then destroyed 
the mock government that invited their help. We, the Allies, 
supported that anti-Soviet minority, and, in so far as our help 
was efficacious, contribute our share in obtaining for Germany 
many a victorious progress from one end of the Black Sea Coast 
to the other. In helping the Ukrainian minority we helped the 
Germans to secure Ukrainian bread and coal and iron that would 
otherwise have gone to help Russia to recuperate. In Finland 
we repeated the mistake. We gave at least moral help to the 
White Finns, simply because they were opposed to the Red 
Finns, who were supported by the Soviets, not realizing that the 
White Finns were the -pawns of Germany, and that in the defea'i 
of the Red Finns we witnessed the defeat of the only party in 
Finland which was bound, by its socialistic nature, to be an 
enemy of imperialistic Germany. Do not let us make the same 
mistake in Russia. If the Allies lend help to any minority that 
cannot overthrow the Soviets without them, they will be impos- 
ing on Free Russia a government w^hich will be in perpetual need 
of external help, and will, for simple reasons of geography, be 
bound to take that help from Germany. Remember that for the 
German autocracy, conscious of the socialistic mass beneath it, 
the mere existence of the Soviet Government of Russia is a 
serious danger. Remember that any non-Soviet Government in 
Russia would be welcomed by Germany and, reciprocally, could 
not but regard Germany as its protector. Remember that the 
revolutionary movement in Eastern Europe, no less than the 
American and British Navies, is an integral part of the Allied 
Blockade of the Central Empires. 

And, apart from the immediate business of the war, remem- 
ber that Gennany is seeking by every means, open and secret, 
to obtain such command over Russian resources as will in the 
long run allow her to dictate her will to Russia's people. Remem- 

29 



ber that the Soviet Government, fully aware of this, would be 
glad of your help, of your co-operation, would be glad even 
to give you control over some part of her resources, if only to 
prevent that ominous ultimate dominion within Russia of a single 
foreign power. 

Remember all these things, if indeed you need, as I think you 
do not need, such selfish motives to prompt you to the support of 
•men who, if they fail, will fail from having hoped too much. 
Every true man is in some sort, until his youth dies and his eyes 
harden, the potential builder of a New Jerusalem. At some time 
or other, every one of us has dreamed of laying his brick in such 
a work. And even if this thing that is being builded here with 
tears and blood is not the golden city that we ourselves have 
dreamed, it is still a thing to the sympathetic understanding of 
which each one of us is bound by wliatever he owes to his own 
youth. And if each one of us, then, all the more each nation, 
by what it owes to those first daring days of its existence, when 
all the world looked askance upon its presumptuous birth. Amer- 
ica was young once, and there were men in America who would 
have brought in foreign aid to re-establish their dominion over 
a revolted nation. Are those the men to whom America now 
looks back with gratitude and pride? 

Well, writing at speed to break my pen, and with the knowl- 
edge that in a few hours the man leaves Moscow who is to carry 
this letter with him to America, I have failed to say much that I 
would have said. I write now with my messenger w^aiting for my 
manuscript and somehow or other, incoherent, incomplete as it 
is, must bring it to an end. I will end as I began, with a quota- 
tion from your own Emerson : 

"What is tlie scholar, what is the man for, but for hos- 
pitality to every new thought of his time? Have you leisure, 
power, property, friends ? you shall be the asylum and patron 
of every new thought, every unproven opinion, every untried 
project, which proceeds out of good will and honest seek- 
ing. All the newspapers, all the tongues of to-day will of 
course at first defame what is noble ; but you who hold not 
of today, not of the times, but of the Everlasting, are to 
stand for it; and the highest compliment man ever receives 
from heaven is the sending to him its disguised and dis- 
credited angels." 

30 



No one contends that the Bolsheviks are angels.. I only 
ask that men shall look through the fog of libel that surrounds 
them and see that the ideal for which they .are struggling, in the 
only way in which they can struggle is among those lights which 
every man of young and honest heart sees before him somewhere 
on the road, and not among those other lights from which he 
resolutely turns away. These men who have made the Soviet 
Government in Russia, if they must fail, will fail with clean 
shields and clean hearts, having striven for an ideal which will 
live beyond them. Even if they fail, they will none the less have 
written a page of history more daring than any other which I can 
remember in the history of humanity. They are writing it amid 
showers of mud from all the meaner spirits in their country, in 
yours and in my own. But, when the thing is over, and their 
enemies have triumphed, the mud will vanish like black magic 
at noon^ and that page will be as white as the snows of Russia, 
glittering in the sun when I looked from my windows in 
Petrograd. 

And when, in after years, men read that page they will 
judge your country and mine, your race and mine, by the help or 
hindrance they gave to the writing of it. 

ARTHUR RANSOME. 

Moscow, May, 1918. 



31 



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